September 13 2026
Hosea 3
With the arrival of fall not too far away, it won’t be long until we will be seeing people setting up their fake deer in their backyards or for others not so fancy, a bale of hay with a bullseye on it. Those who hunt deer know that they have to get out their weapon of choice, their compound bow, crossbow or shotgun and begin to sight it in. Every good deer hunter knows that they can’t expect to head for the woods and hope that everything is just going to work like it should. No, the ones who are successful know that they have to practice a little to see if there are any issues with sighting their weapon in on the target. Now I have never got into deer hunting but my Dad and many of my cousins have all hunted deer and have been successful at bringing home some great bucks. Now when they tell their stories after their day of hunting, one thing you rarely hear these hunters say is that the reason they failed to bring home a home a deer was the fault of the deer that they were hunting. All good deer hunters know that their success or failure lies in their own abilities and readiness and not in finding a deer that will stand still long enough for them to take them down.
Well, what might surprise readers of the Bible is that this image of aiming a weapon and using it to hit a target, just like deer hunters do, is found in many places throughout the scripture. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what is written of in scripture is an image of an archer shooting off an arrow and missing their target. This is the interesting picture behind the very common idea of sinning. When the writers of the Bible wanted to define just what is meant when a person sins, they decided to use this very common image of a person who takes his bow, and sets his arrow off in the direction of a target and ends up missing that target all together. Now this gives us an interesting way to wrap our minds around what we mean when we say that we all sin. Take for example the well known verse from the third chapter of Romans. If we put this verse in its original meaning it would read, “For all people have aimed at the target of God’s glory and every single one them have fallen short of hitting that target.” So what we to know about ourselves is that we are a bunch of terrible hunters when it comes to trying to hit the target God desires us to hit, the target being his glory.
Well, it might surprise people that they are even to supposed to be hitting a target, and that the target that they are to hit is something called God’s glory. To know what we are to be aiming at we first have to know what is meant by the glory of God. Well, in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the gospel of John, Jesus tells us that the glory of God is found at the cross. So this helps us understand that when we speak about God pledging his love to us, the love communicated to us at the cross, this faithful love is the very glory of God. As we have studied Hosea we learned the truth that we are indeed the beloved of God. We know that this is our true identity because of the truth communicated to us at the cross. There, Jesus the perfect Son of God, gave his life for us as the greatest act of love. It is at the cross where God pledged himself to us in the truth of his unfailing love, a love which is righteous and just, a love that stands with us, and a love which is merciful to us. This is why the cross, with all of its awful ugliness is still to be known to us at the place where the glory of God is most clearly seen by us.
So when we are told by Paul that all of us are like archers who continually miss when we shoot at the target of God’s glory, what this means is that we fail miserably to love God faithfully with the same faithful love that he always demonstrates to us. You see, the image of God that we find in the second chapter of Hosea is one of a man who betroths himself to his bride-to be. This image helps us to understand that when God enters into a covenant relationship with us, our relationship is much like a covenant relationship of marriage. As in marriage, our relationship with God begins with a promise from God to be faithful to love us always. As we know all too well, relationships have their beginning in trust, for if the two people within a relationship do not trust each other then there is not much hope of there being any relationship at all. God’s announcement to be always true in his love to us is backed up through the payment of his costly love shown at the cross.
This pledge of God to be true in loving us always means that now we can know ourselves as forever being the beloved of God. Yet what is not heard as the second chapter of Hosea closes is a declaration by the people of God that they will be betrothed to God, pledging to faithfully love God at all times, no matter what. No, as we enter the third chapter of Hosea such a pledge is strangely absent. Instead our attention is once again on Hosea and the marriage that God told him to enter into with a prostitute, a woman named Gomer. As we remember from the first chapter of Hosea, God told Hosea to do such a disgraceful act in order to demonstrate to his people, the people of Israel, the terrible shape of their covenant relationship with him. They were like the woman Hosea married because they had many lovers, false gods, which they worshipped. Yet in spite of their chasing after many other false gods, the one true living God desired to be in a covenant relationship with his people. In the third chapter then we again pick up the story and Hosea and his marriage to Gomer. What we discover is that Gomer has done the unthinkable act of committing adultery. We can only imagine how devastated Hosea must have been. He had gone and taken Gomer out of a life of prostitution, and he married her and they had three children together. Yet in spite of his great love for her, she nonetheless, goes and finds another man to love. Hosea would be justified at this point to divorce Gomer, yet once again, God speaks to Hosea, and tells him to once again to bring her back into his home. If the people around him whispered about his state of mind when Hosea first married Gomer, they must have really shook their heads in disbelief when Hosea found Gomer at her lover’s house and took her by the hand and once again brought her to live with him. What the people of God did not realize though is that this is exactly the sense of shame that they should have had about their relationship with God for they were the ones who had been unfaithful in their relationship with him. I mean, could they not understand that as his people, they were doing the very same act with God that Gomer had done to Hosea? God had pledged himself to faithfully love his people always so that they would forever know themselves as being the beloved of God, and their response to this pledge of love was that they went and found another lover to share their life with.
Now what Hosea does next is also rather unthinkable for we are told that he paid fifteen shekels of silver and a measure of barley for Gomer. What we are to know about this gift is that this was the bride price that would have been paid by the groom-to be when he asked the father of the bride-to be for his daughter. What God wants us to understand is that he is willing to pay the cost involved in loving his people not just when he enters into a relationship with them but God is also willing to pay the costly price of his love when his people desired to return to him after being unfaithful to him. This gift of God’s love given to his people when they break their covenant relationship with him is the gift that is implied in the for-gifting of God. When we miss the target of loving God with the same faithful love which he first demonstrated to us, God does not abandon us as he is well justified to do. No, when we fail in our love of God we find that God begins again with us by offering us the same gift as when we first began, the gift of his costly love for us.
Now what we are to learn through God’s forgiving us when we miss the mark is that our security is found only here in God’s willingness to forgive us for our failure, in his offering to us his costly gift of love when we fail to faithfully love him. It is God’s willingness to pay the price for our failures that gives us the space to own up to those failures. When we accept that we are people who miss the mark of of the glory of God and accept the forgiveness of this sin, then we have the assurance that our failures do not have to be fatal.
When we rightly understand the forgiveness of God then we are set free to be honest about ourselves before him. One of the biggest detriments to receiving the forgiveness God offers to us when we fail him is that instead of being honest about our failure to faithfully love God, we instead blame someone else for our own refusal to love. This blaming of others is a crucial part of what the church calls original sin. As we may remember, when God confronted Adam and Eve when they ate of the fruit that was forbidden for them to eat, both of them refused to own up to their own wrongdoing. When God asked Adam if he had eaten from the tree that God had commanded him not to eat, Adam replied, ‘The woman that you gave me to be with, she gave to me from the tree and I ate.” The simple answer Adam was supposed to give was, “Yes, God I did eat from the tree”. Instead, Adam implied that God was somewhat at fault because God had given Eve to Adam, and it was this Eve who had given the fruit to him. Eve, in all fairness faired no better in telling the truth of her failure, for she replied to God, “The serpent deceived me and I ate.” What Eve could not own up to is that she had listened to the voice of another who deceived her instead of listening first and always to God. It was not that the serpent had spoken to her but rather that Eve had listened to his voice and obeyed that voice, this was the problem. Yet what was lost in Adam and Eve playing the blame game was that they never learned that God was willing to forgive their failure. They could not know the faithfulness of God that is found in his forgiveness simply because they refused to own up to the fact that they had failed to faithfully love God. If we put it in terms of missing the mark, we might say that the reason we fail to hit the mark is always squarely on us and our failure can never can be blamed on the target. We must learn to own our failures before God so that when we fail to love one another we never blame our failure to love on the person we are supposed to love . The real reason why we fail to love anyone else, is always found in the fact that we are people who cannot faithfully hit the target of the glory of God, which is his faithful love witnessed at the cross.
God is always willing to forgive our failure but only if we are willing to confess that we have failed. As we hear in the first chapter of the first letter of John, “If we say we have never missed the mark, we are just fooling ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess when we have missed the mark, when we have failed to love as God first loved us, then God is faithful and just to forgive us all of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned we make God out to be a liar.” The danger of playing the blame game is that we will not be willing to confess our failure to love, and in doing so we will never learn the security that is found in the willingness of God to forgive us anytime we admit that we have failed.
So as we consider the basic building blocks of being in a relationship with God, we began first with the fact that God loves us. Everything else about our relationship builds on this foundational base. The second basic building block is that God speaks to us, or better we might say, that God communicates to us. God communicates to us so that we might know that what he loves most is us. What is on the mind of God is his desire to do the very best for each and every person. This is why we can know the truth about ourselves as being that we are the beloved of God. It was on the cross that God pledged to be faithful to love us with this costly love that he has for all people. There on the cross we witnessed how Jesus the innocent Son of God, stood with all innocent victims. Jesus suffers with all of them in their suffering which is the very definition of mercy. Yet Jesus also stood with all those who caused his suffering, setting aside the righteous demands of justice, and instead offering even these who desired his death the very mercy of God when he cried out, “Father forgive them for they know no what they do”. So while it is true that God calls us his beloved, it is also true that we are those who fail miserably in being faithful in responding to this love of God with a love of our own. So another basic building block is that we are people who depend on God’s forgiveness for we need God’s faithfulness to cover our failures .
Our failure to faithfully love God is found in the fact that we are prone to chase after other love interests just like Hosea’s wife Gomer had done. These other love interests are the subject of a story found in the eighteenth chapter of Luke. There we read of how a ruler came to Jesus and asked him, “Good teacher, just what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replies, “Why do you call me good, for no one is good but God alone.” Jesus then asked this man if he knew the commandments and the man stated that he had kept them from his youth. When Jesus heard this, he said to this man, “There is one thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and give it all to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me.” When this man heard this he became very sad for he was extremely rich. In this story we find that one of the main ways people attempt to be secure in this world is through power and riches. People know that if they can control the actions of the people around them, the definition of power, and if they can accumulate enough worldly wealth to eliminate any hardship, then they can convince themselves that they have achieved some sense of security. This is what we see here in the figure of this rich, ruler who came to Jesus. Yet, it does not take much thinking to realize that such a security dissolves right at the moment of death. So this rich, ruler came to Jesus to find an eternal security he sensed was missing from his life. What Jesus tried to make this man understand is that through his finding his security through power and wealth, he had never come to know that God alone is good, as found when Jesus corrected him. Yes, this man knew the commandments of God but what he did not know is the good God who gave him those commandments.Since he had never entered into a relationship with the God who pledges to faithfully love his people always, he could not know of the security found when this same faithful love covered over his failure to respond with a faithful love of his own. The only solution was for Jesus to tell this man to rid himself of any security otherwise than the goodness of God and his faithful love which is always willing to forgive our failures..This man needed to experience the ever faithful love of God and to discover that when he failed to faithfully love God that God was willing to forgive him if he was willing to confess his failure. In this way, this man could realize that the treasure of heaven, the costly love God, is the true riches we are to pursue. Yet, tragically this man went away unable to leave his other loves behind which serves as a warning for us all. I pray that when we are faced with finding a true security that we will chose the forgiveness of God, now and always. To God be the glory! Amen!
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